In conventional sensing applications, a sensor or a controller is adapted to a host board where a sensing application is loaded via mainly a sensor adapter board of a particular specification and through a bus. When an application is developed, the sensor provider must provide the associated application developer with an application programming interface for communicating with the host board driving program so as to perform the sensing. For different sensing development environments and program development languages, various different sets of application interfaces are needed to develop a plurality of sensing applications.
If the aforesaid host board is placed into a sensor network architecture, then it becomes a network node. Each network node connects to a primary node via mainly a wireless or wired communication protocol. The primary node is connected to the host board where the sensing application is loaded via an adapter board of a particular specification (e.g., a universal asynchronous receiver transmitter (UART)).
A user can execute an application associated with a single sensor on one node to communicate with the host board driving program, and perform operations associated with the sensor via the sensor adapter board and the network node. However, in cases where the sensor network architecture is not supported by the application interface, the support of the host board and the primary node and the communication between the host board and the sensing network need to be taken into consideration when the application is developed in order to communicate with the sensor successfully when the application is executed.
Further, sensors, network nodes and sensor adapter boards produced by different sensor manufactures usually have different specifications. Therefore, how to make further interpretations for different data contents generated by the sensor adapter boards, the network nodes of different specifications and the buses therebetween also needs to be taken in to consideration during development of the application.
Accordingly, not only each sensor provider must expand their application interfaces additionally to the network level, but also multiple sets of application interfaces need to be prepared according to various different networks, different development environments and different development languages. Therefore, the conventional application interfaces represent a great burden to the sensor providers. Moreover, the need of developing the sensing network applications via different application interfaces makes the development of the sensing network applications quite inconvenient and inflexible.
Accordingly, an urgent need exists in the art to provide a solution capable of improving the sensing data processing manner based on the existing sensor network hardware architecture so as to accelerate the development of the application and improve the flexibility in use of the application.